05 | WTF (WHAT THE FAILURE)
🤷♀️ Welcome back to WTF (“What the Failure”) Wednesday where I share different examples of failure in international development, aid, and poverty alleviation writ large.
👉 The goal is not to point fingers, but to resurface learnings so we don’t all make the same mistakes. Today is a “Just Ship It: Used Clothing” edition.
🚫 Africa is not your dumpster. Latin America is not your dumpster. Asia is not your dumpster.
Today I am reposting a couple of videos that will say it better than I can.
The sound isn’t great – here’s a rough transcript.
“Used clothing, but something like this [holding up a pair of pink women’s panties]. Fortunately they [South African government?] banned used undergarments but something like this [the panties] are smuggled in. How? The way they tie them, You can’t know that they are containing something like this [the panties]. They mix them with the other clothing. You can see this one. Even the elastic is gone. It cannot still be in there. [She examines the crotch] And it is also soiled. But somebody said to send it to Africa. That’s why our leaders think it is a cut. I mean, they lack dignity and even the dictators are ashamed of displaying something like this, what?“
🙀 See also the situation with “recycled clothes” in Ghana.
Just last year, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) published a study about this global problem. They found:
- International trade in used clothing has boomed, predominantly from the Global North to the Global South, driven by the advent of fast fashion
- Importing countries struggle to deal effectively with large inflows of low-quality used clothing
- Exporting countries struggle to deal effectively with used clothing and end up exporting textile waste to developing countries
